Four Autumns Of Severus Snape
by Genevieve22
Summary: Four Autumns of Severus Snape through the impact of different women in his life.
1. September

Eileen Snape, Nee Prince, has never been distinguished by any particular affection to anything, nor, especially, by the love to all living beings. It seemed that the last crumbs of her warmth were squandered on her wedding day with a Muggle, that like a flash of lightning turned her life into two bleeding wounds.

She desperately wanted to find her place in a strange world, and she instilled this love in her little son, who was not distinguished either by beauty, or by talents, or by his background. What else could she pass to him? She, an exile from the wizarding world, that was never accepted by a Muggle one either? The desire to find one's own place under the sun and love for music.

While waiting for her husband to return from the factory, Eileen used to transfigure the rotten dinner table into a piano and used to play a sad and beautiful tune that seemed to embody autumn and her very life. Poverty and deprivation played an insignificant role in those harsh times: everyone lived like that, and children from the surrounding areas were often friends with the children of wizards who paid too little attention to the ghosts of an extinct ideology, leaving protocols and pure manners to purebloods that were already too few. Therefore, Eileen believed that the world of her husband would accept her without noticing the difference between miracles and routine.

The world may not have noticed, but she knew all too well that she was deceiving herself. The novelty of a new life subsided, as the tide at dawn, leaving only the empty bottom full of algae and fish, not fortunate enough to survive. Eileen desperately wanted to go there, to the world of her childhood, soaked in the colors of magic, the taste of miracles and the scents of memories. She told her son a fairy tale about the life where she would no longer return, and played a sad melody, hiding from all adversity in the old kitchen.

And the son was sitting in the attic and painting pictures of the world with a fragment of coal. The pictures of life he had no place in, the life saturated with the scent of meadow grasses and warmed by the sun of late September ...

He was grateful to his mother for the short-lived warmth that she managed to convey to him, and for stories about a better world, which was able to illuminate the darkness coming from all sides, and also for the music that came through the open window of the old kitchen.

He put asters on the tombstone and barely managed to suppress a sigh: "Mom, I promise, I will become better, and the world you told me about in fairy tales will accept me."

He walked away from the cemetery, retaining in his heart a love for music and the last days of September, clinging by a name given by his mother, a name, no one in the new world had heard from the time of the Roman Empire - Severus. Severus Snape.


	2. October

She burst into his life like the sun: a girl with a floral name and fiery hair. And he was glad to follow her to the end. She wanted to be popular, wanted to subjugate the world to herself, in order to illuminate it with the flame of her identity.

She probably always considered herself something better than the others: she was a daughter of loving parents, an exemplary sister, a popular girl who could make flowers bloom, what could be better? Beggars from neighboring neighborhoods looked with envy and ill-concealed curiosity at the bright and warm house of Evans, and even two sisters who eagerly ate cakes when their families rarely had an extra slice of bread.

In those days, everyone lived like this, because children did not divide each other into friends and foes, leaving the right to decide who was right and who was to blame to the life that loomed over the horizon. Dreamers continued to dream, doers continued to do, and a red-haired girl with a wave of her hand continued making daisies bloom.

Severus watched, fascinated, as the wind played with her hair, and his heart still kept believing into the foolish dream that he too could be needed by this world, and the world would accept him, without asking for anything in return. He was the first to tell her about magic, and the first to show her an old piano that remained standing in the kitchen of his impoverished house. She was a princess of her own kingdom, and he wanted to worship her. He would give her his own heart in his palm, but the girl did not need his heart. The girl needed universal love, which a poor boy like him could not give her.

Years went by. She collected love in a vessel of her own soul, so that love would once help her to save the world from the evil, and he won his right to be needed at least by someone. October stepped in from all sides, ready to sing the penultimate dirge of the year. He just wanted to find someone who would care about him, that's why he so desperately tossed between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, trying to deserve at least a hint of someone else's warmth. The world where he so desperately sought to get in accepted him, however, he did not need this anymore. He made the most terrible of his own mistakes, and the popular girl again became the savior of the world. For the last time.

Severus did not ask himself anymore why everything ended like this, and he didn't feel sorry for his own life. He knew that, in his own battle for the place under the sun, he cursed his whole life and involuntarily destroyed all that light that Lily had embodied for him.

The blood-red drop of the maple-leaf laid quietly on the ground. The last day of October blessed and cursed all those who survived.

Severus was walking around in the Forbidden Forest. He was not cold, he had long ceased to be afraid of frost. A person without a heart can hardly feel anything and regret something. He lived like this maple leaf, and the wind carried him on its wings. However, not everything was lost in his petrified soul, he recalled that last day of October, and watched the ghost of a girl with a floral name appeared high in the sky, in a crystal clear innocent sky.

The night forest was shrouded in mist, and he reached his hands toward the silvery doe that wandered among the trees, and she comes to him to dissolve in their mutual solitude. This night was a reflection of souls and thoughts. And the song of the heart, preserved there from his childhood, would not subside, as long as he and his immense grief were alive, while the fog shrouded the forest, while the pale moon shone. Many moons would rise before the doe left him and went into the shadows of a new night, but until then this last day of October gave them the right to mutual reflection before it dissolved in the night from a lack of light.


	3. November

The gloomy and rotten autumn of November was the best reflection of his life for the next two decades of an insane race for the echoes of a better world. He no longer asked himself what he was doing in this life, where he had no place from the very beginning, he went forward, trying to reach the end. He did not hope to become a hero, he just did not want to die alone.

The mistakes of the past years shattered those fragile memories of the sun once warm in his soul and now became too dark to accept even a hint of light. November was over, winter would come, and he would no longer need to ask himself where all the light had gone. There never was any light. There always was too much darkness.

There was blood. His own, or foreign, rare accidental and deliberate, it did not matter anymore. There was his duty prescribing to be useful to both parties, who had already forgotten about the original meaning of the battle. It was contempt. Hatred of light, appreciation of darkness, and again blood and pain. The pain was good, the pain reminded him that he was still alive, although he did not understand why. Red flashes of "Crucio", white ones of "Sectumsempra", frozen at the tip of his wand, and again this dull and hopeless pain.

And after his reports to the light, his reports to the darkness, after million faces of other women, whom he dragged into his bed to stay warm for at least a couple of hours, after an amber bottle of whiskey to clear the mess in his thoughts, where, as in muddy waters, his whole meaningless life floundered, this hopeless gloom of November had come.

And there were two bouquets: asters and lilies. And two phrases: "Mom, I promise, I'll be better" and "Forgive me, Lily."

The biggest mistake in his life made him stronger when he himself didn't remember he was, so he walked further into the darkness of this grey November.


	4. Indian Summer

The girl with a mass of brown curls and amber eyes plagued his life for the past seven years and never asked permission to reappear in it after more than a decade had passed. She always knew everything better than others and did not look for her place in this world, having confidently established herself in it from the very beginning. She had some of her own losses, she silently watched the emptiness at night and believed in one of her well-known ideals. And she ruined the life of the one unfortunate professor.

He became a hero for everyone and refused to believe it, and she became his assistant in the potions lab, claiming her right to learn from the best as the heroine of the War. Every day she made his life unbearable, searching for a remedy for all problems, helping all the disadvantaged and proving to him that all was yet to lose.

She, of course, ranked him among hundreds of her endless projects, as if he was an elf or a stray dog that needed warmth and a bowl of soup. She talked with him on an equal footing and was silent when a sad piano melody could be heard from the room, and after that, she did not comment on what she heard.

She did not seek to subjugate him to herself and she didn't ask him to play by her own rules, but she was there for him both on the lingering warm days of September and the fatal evening of October, and on the dank November nights when the only whiskey and silver doe were his only interlocutors. She was silent, understanding without words - the unbearable Granger-girl, who believed in a miracle when there were no miracles left.

And so, when a raven Patronus flew at his feet in one of such vicious, tar-like nights instead of a silvery doe and stared at him in bewilderment, it was she who said that this was how it should have been from the very beginning, and that, as always, he never had a choice to express his wishes to anybody. He shouted that it was only him to blame for everything, and who she thought she was to enter his life with her own set of rules? And probably he even smashed the bottle of firewhisky against the wall, and after that, when she fell asleep, crouched on the sofa in the laboratory, very close to the entrance in his private quarters, he covered her with a blanket and promised himself that he would be better.

And afterward, when he habitually put lilies and asters on the tombs of Lily and his mother, it was she who told him: "They forgave you, it's time for you to forgive yourself."

And a capricious and warm Indian summer burst into his life to show him that miracle, in which he did not even hope to believe, became reality.


End file.
